NOTES ON 'CLASS'

Richard Gunn

(Common Sense, No. 2, 1987)

1. It is much easier to say what, according to Marxism, class is not than to say what class is. A class is not a group of individuals, specified by what they have in common (their income-level or life-style, their 'source of revenue' [1], their relation to the means of production, etc.). The proletariat, for example, is not to be defined as a group 'as against capital'. [2] Nor is a class a structurally and relationally specified ”place” in the social landscape (a place which individual may ”occupy” or in which, as individuals, they may be 'interpolated', [3] etc.). The difference between ”empiricist” and ”structuralist” Marxisms, which respectively treat classes as groups of individuals or as ”places”, is in this regard a trivial one. For want of a more convenient term I shall refer to the view which treats classes either as groups or as places as the 'sociological' conception of class.

2. Marxism regards class as, like capital itself (Marx 1965 p. 766), a social relation. That which is a relation cannot be a group even a relationally specified group; nor can it be a place (relationally specified place) in which a group may be constituted, or may stand. Setting aside such views, we can say that class is the relation itself (for example, the capital-labour relation) and, more specifically, a relation of struggle. The terms 'class' and 'class-relation' are interchangeable, and 'a' class is a class relation of some particular kind.

3. In other words: it is not that classes, as socially pre-given entities, enter into struggle. Rather class struggle is the fundamental premise of class. Better still: class struggle is class itself. (This is how Marx introduces 'class' in the opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto.) That 'class struggle' is intrinsic to 'class' is Marx's point when he stresses that existence 'for itself' – i.e. the oppositional, struggling existence – is intrinsic to the existence of class (Marx 1969 p. 173).

4. I shall refer to the conception of class as a relation (a relation of struggle) as the 'Marxist' conception of class: here, more than convenience dictates the terminological choice. Notoriously, the sociological conception of class faces the embarrasment that not all individuals in bourgeois society can be fitted, tidily, into the groups which it labels 'capitalists' and 'proletarians'. This embarrasment is produced by the conception of classes as groups or places, and to escape this embarrasment, sociological Marxism has recourse to categories like 'the middle classes', the 'middle strata', etc.: such categories are residual or catch-all groups and, in short, theoretical figments generated by an impoverished conceptual scheme. The Marxist conception class, on the contrary, faces no such difficulties: it regards the class-relation (say, the capital-labour relation) as structuring the lives of different individuals in different ways. The contrast in this regard between the Marxist and the sociological conceptions of class can be illustrated, very roughly, as follows:

(See the illustration above.)

Not least, this illustration is rough because the difference in the ways in which the capital-labour relation structures the lives of individuals in bourgeois society is as much qualitative as quantitative: a spatial diagram can only be ”undialectical”, abstracting not only from qualitative distinctions but also from the 'sheer unrest of life' (Hegel 1977 p. 27) – the unrest of struggle – which characterises a class-relation in any given case. (The model for such spatial diagrams is the Figurae of Joachim of Fiore, which become no longer necesary once the spiritual intelligence they summon has come into its own: cf. Reeves 1976 p. 13.)

5. What qualitative forms can the structuring of lives by the capital-labour (once again, a relation always of struggle) take? The form to which Marx especially attends is that of exploitation/expropriation. Other forms include inclusion/exclusion (Foucault), appropriation/expenditure and homogeneity/heterogeneity (Bataille) and incorporation/refusal (Marcuse, Tronti):[4] the list is phenomenologically rich, and open-ended.

6. One difference between the Marxist and the sociological views, as illustrated above, is that on the Marxist view the 'pure' worker (situated on the extreme left-hand side), whose social being is (unlike all the ”intermediate” figures) in no way divided in and against him or herself, is in no way methdolologically privileged. Neither is the 'pure' capitalist. Both, rather, are merely limiting cases and, as such, they are seen only as figures comingled with other in a diversely-structured crowd. The sociological view, on the other hand, treats the 'pure' worker and the 'pure' capitalist as methodological pillars between which the web of intermediate classes is slung.

7. The difference is important because, acoording to Marx, the 'pure' worker does not exist. This is not at all because of a relative decline in the numbers of the ”traditional working class” (however this theoretically suspect group be defined). On the contrary, it is because the wage relation itself is a bourgeois and mystifying form (Marx 1965 Part VI): whoever lives under its sign – even, and especially, the fully-employed producer of surplus-value -lives a life divided in and against itself. His or her feet remain mired in exploitation even while his or head (which is tempted to construe this exploitation in terms of ”low wages”, i.e., in terms which are mystified) breathes in bourgeois ideological clouds. [5] Accordingly, the line of class-struggle runs through the individual by whom surplus-value is produced (as with, say, the figure standing second-to-the-left in the diagram in para. 4, above). Here, again, there is no embarrasment for the Marxist conception of class which is interested in the specific ways in which the capital-labour relation structures, antagonistically, particular lives. But the non-existence of a proletariat in all its purity can only bring the sociological conception of class to the ground.

8. A further evident difference between the two schemes is that the Marxist one speaks of a single class-relation (namely, the capital-labour relation) as obtaining in existing society whereas the sociological scheme acknowledges as many such relations as there are possible link-ups between social places or groups. For this reason, the 'sociologists' accuse the 'Marxists' of reductionism. In fact, it is against the sociologists themselves that the charge of reductionism may properly be brought. The sociologists want to situate each individual, unequivocally and without remainder, in one or other of the specified groups or places: a ”cross categorial” individual cannot be allowed to appear in the picture which the sociologists draw. The point of the sociologists' proliferation of middle classes, middle strata, new petty bourgeoisies, etc., is to find some pigeon-hole to which each individual may be unequivocally assigned. Hence precisely the ways in which, in class terms, individuals are divided in and against themselves – the numerous and complex ways in which the geological fracture-line of class struggle lies through and not merely between individuals – enters theoretical eclipse. Hence sociologists' reductionism. The Marxist conception of class, by contrast, brings experiental richness of this (self-)contradictory life-texture into full theoretical and phenomenological light. The charge that Marxism reduces the lived experience of individual subjectivity to a play of impersonal and sheerly objective ”class forces” [6] is least of all applicable when 'class' is understood in its authentically Marxist sense.

9. A related point is that the Marxist conception, unlike that of the sociologists, does not construe class in terms of the bearing of this or that social role. From his early essay 'On the Jewish Question' onwards, Marx castigates, as alienated and unfree, any society wherein role-definitions (or a ”social division of labour”) obtain. Far from inscribing role-defintions as a methodological principle, the Marxian view of class depicts the individual as the site of a struggle – of his or her own struggle – which brings not only the ”universal” (role-bearing and socially homogenous) but also ”particular” (unique and socially heterogeneous) dimensions of individuality into play. Neither in theory nor in practice do role-definitions such as ”proletarian” or ”bourgeois” (or indeed ”man” or ”woman” or ”citizen”) represent Marx's solution; on the contrary they figure as one among the problems which 'class' in its Marxist designation is intended to resolve.

10. As between the Marxist and the sociological conceptions of class yet another area of difference is, of course, political. The sociological view advertises a politics of alliances between classes and class-fractions: moreover it ascribes to the 'pure' working class a privileged – a leading or hegemonic – political role. No question of such alliances arises on the Marxist view. Nor does the 'pure' working class (the employed as opposed to the unemployed, the direct producers of surplus-value as opposed to the ”indirect” producers, the proletariat as opposed to the lumpenproletariat, those whose labour does not) have a politically any more than a methodologically privileged place: for no such ”places” exist. Nor is there any question of ascribing to ”rising” as opposed to ”declining” classes a monopoly of revolutionary interest or force: such specifications only make sense when classes are seen as places or as groups. Finally, the whole notion of a vanguard party (plus its diluted variants) is overturned since the distinction between ”advanced” and ”backaward” class-elements disappears along with the sociological conception of class itself. In sum: what has traditionally passed as 'Marxist' politics is in fact sociological, and authentically Marxist politics amounts to politics in an anarchistic mode.

11. If classes are not groups or places but relations of struggle, then insofar as revolutionary conflict takes the form of a conflict between groups (but it always does this imperfectly and impurely) this has to be understood as the result of class struggle itself. It is not to be understood sociologically as, for example, an emergence of pregiven classes – at last! - into their no-less-pregiven theoretical and political 'truth'. The question before the individual is not on whose side, but rather on which side (which side of the class relation) he or she stands; and even this latter question is not to be understood as a choice between socially pre-existing places or roles. Not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, class struggle remains inherently unpredictable. The Marxian conception of class focuses sharply the issue of choice with which class struggle confronts us and in doing so it disallows appeal to any role or place or group in which (according to sociology) we already stand prior to whatever self-determining commitment we choose to make. It disallows this not least because it depicts us as torn by the force of the class struggle in which, in a class society, we are always-already consciously or unconsciously engaged.

12. Whoever wishes, can derive sociological wisdom from Marx's texts. Certainly, and especially in his political writings, Marx was not always a Marxist: for example the 'two great camps' conception of class espoused in the Communist Manifesto results from constructing the Marxist conception of class in an out-and-out sociological sense. Nonetheless, unless the Marxist conception of class were in fact Marx's the circumstance that Marx wrote Capital would be unintelligible. It was Marx himself who, long before his critics and revisionists, pointed out that as capitalism developed the numbers of the 'middle classes' could be expected to grow (Marx 1968 pp. 562, 573); and yet he writes a book, entitled Capital, in which a single class-relation (the capital-labour relation) is the theoretical 'object' addressed. This conundrum can be resolved only by taking his remark about the middle classes to be sociological, and by reading the main argument of Capital as Marxist in the above-specified sense.

13. The sociological conception of class, whenever it wishes to establish Marxist credentials, always becomes economic-determinist. This is so because the only ”indicator” of class-membership ('class', here, being seen as once again a place or group) which Marx's writings supply is that of a common relation to the means of production. Besides being related to the means of production, however, individuals are class-members (or who are class-interpolated) find themselves related to the state and to ”ideology” to say nothing about their local church or football team or pub. Hence, at once, the sociological conception of class generates a schema of discrete social 'levels' or 'practices' or 'instances' (Althusser) and must address the question of how these levels are related. The answer is well-known: in the last instance 'the economic movement...asserts itself as necessary'. [7] In the last instance, in other words, sociological Marxism amounts to an economic determinism with, to be sure, long and complex deterministic strings. To claim, as Althusser does, that such a theory (because of its complexity) is no longer economistic is like claiming that a machine is no longer a machine in virtue of the number of cogwheels its motor drives.

14. With the Marxist conception of class, everything is different. Marx's distinction between class 'in itself' and 'for itself' is to be taken as distinguishing, not between societal levels (cf. Footnote 5, above), but between the sociological and the Marxist conceptions of class itself: if a class only becomes such when it is 'for itself' then political struggle with all its unpredictable ramifications and developments and expenditures is already built into what sociological Marxism treats as the economic ”base”. Whereas sociological Marxism attempts to unite levels which it assumes to be discrete, and on the basis of this starting-point and problem can only upon causalist and external relations of however 'structural' (Althusser) a kind, Marxist Marxism moves in the opposite direction and draws distinctions within a contradictory totality, i.e. within an internally and antagonistically related whole: 'The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse (Marx 1973 p. 101). As diagram in para. 4 makes clear, the totality of the class-relation which is specific to, for example, bourgeois society (the capital-labour relation) is present – wholly present, though in qualitatively different ways – in each of the individuals who form that society's moments or part. The essential thing was said long ago by the early Lukács: 'It is not the primacy of the economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality' (Lukács 1971 p. 27).

15. Along with 'the point of view of the totality', a wholly novel conception of class politics is brought into play. Once ”politics” is seen (as it is by the sociologists) as a discrete social level the litmus test of the existence of class 'for itself' becomes the formation of a political party of a more or less conventional – which means: a bourgeois – kind. Seen thus, even a vanguard party amount to a variation on a bourgeois theme. However it is not Marx, but rather bourgeois society, which distinguishes between the levels of political state and civil society – cf. 'On the Jewish Question' – and prescribes the former as the arena wherein social groupings in their maturity (which is to say their conformity) may compete. The Marxist conception of class, or in other words 'the point of view of totality', rejects precisely the narrowness of the conception of politics which the sociological conception of class entails. On the Marxist view, the category of politics becomes as wide as the forms which class struggle (and thereby class itself) unpredictably takes. Not merely is no issue excluded from the political agenda; the notion of political agendas is itself excluded since any such agenda excludes and marginalises whatever does not fall within some theoretically pre-established political domain.

16. The above notes claim neither to completeness nor to the provision of a defence at all points of the conception of class which they have attempted, schematically, to restate. Rather, their aim has been to make clear something of what a Marxist understanding of class entails. As regards evaluation of this understanding: the suggestion may be hazarded that the only possible line of critical questioning which seems fertile is that which asks whether the capital-labour relation is the sole such relation of struggle which, in all its richness, structures our lives. And here there can be no question of supplanting Marx: other such relations (sexual and racial relations, for example) are mediated through the capital relation just as, for its part, it exists as mediated through them. Inquiry as to which such relation is ”dominant” remains scholastic unless embarked on in concretely politcal (which is also to say phenomenological) terms. Both politically and methodologically, the great superiority of Marxist over the sociological is that it frees Marxism from every taint of the determinism which Marx castigated as amongst the most murderous features of capitalism – the tyranny of 'dead' labour over 'living' labour, or in other words of the past (as in all deterministic schemes) over the present and the future – and to which from start to finish his best thinkin stands implacably opposed. This is so because the single theme of Marxian ”class analysis” is the finely-textured and continually and uninterruptedly developing struggle which, for Marx, is the existence of class per se.

Acknowledgements

This paper owes much conversation with John Holloway. Filio Diamanti made me realise that my understanding of 'class' required clarification before discussion of it could even begin.

Notes

1. This much at least is clear from the final, fragmentary, chapter of Capital vol. III (Marx 1971 pp. 885-6).

2. Marx (1969) p. 173.

3. Cf. Althusser (1971) pp. 160-5.

4. See Foucault (1979) Part Four, ch. 2; Bataille (1985); Marcuse (1968); Tronti (1979).

5. The view that the ”ideological” mystification inherent in the wage-form leaves the class-purity of the worker uncontaminated depends on treating production and ideology as discrete social 'levels' or instances; so too does the reading of Marx's distinction between class 'in' and 'for' itself which is rejected in para. 14, below. On the notion of 'levels' see para. 13. In passing, it is worth noting that the conception of ideology as a discrete level (however specified) remains wholly mysterious, if only because social existence without remainder – for example gender distinctions, architecture, work-discipline and scientific knowledge – carries with it an ”ideological” charge.

6. For a discussion of this charge see Sartre (1963).

7. Engels to J Bloch September 21-22 1890 (Marx/Engels n.d. p. 498). Althusser's distinction between 'determining' and 'dominant' instances represents a permutation of the same theme.

References

Althusser L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New Left Books)

Bataille G. (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Manchester University Press)

Foucault M. (1979) Discipline and Punish (Penguin Books)

Hegel G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press)

Lukacs G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness (Merlin Press)

Marcuse H. (1968) One-Dimensional Man (Sphere Books)

Marx K. (1965) Capital Vol. I (Progress Publishers)

Marx K. (1968) Theories of Surplus Value Part II (Lawrence and Wishart)

Marx K. (1969) The Poverty of Philosophy (International Publishers)

Marx K. (1971) Capital Vol. III (Progress Publishers)

Marx K. (1973) Grundrisse (Penguin Books)

Marx K./Engels F. (n.d.) Selected Correspondence (Lawrence and Wishart)

Reeves M. (1976) Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (SPCK)

Sartre J-P. (1963) The Problem of Method (Methuen)

Tronti M. (1979) 'The Strategy of Refusal' in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (CSE Books / Red Notes)

In both Hegelian and Marxist thought, the concept of mediation figures as a central dialectical category. That the category does theoretical, and revolutionary, work is clear. What is less clear, to myself at any rate, is what might be termed the conceptual geography of the category itself. It is this conceptual geography which, as a preliminary to further discussion, the present paper attempts to clarify. A more pretentious title for what follows might be 'Prolegomena to a Reading of Marx'.

To mediate is to bring about a relation by means of a relating (an “intermediate”) term. A mediation is the relating term itself. To count as a mediation, a relating term must be more than a mere catalyst or external condition (however necessary) of the relation: rather, it must itself be the relation. It must constitute it, in the way that for example – and the example is offered merely heuristically – a rope linking two climbers is constitutive of the relation in which they stand.

If a mediation is, thus, the relation which it establishes, it does not follow that just any relation counts as a mediating term. A mediated relation is distinct from a relation for which, to render it intelligible or accurately describe it, no reference to a relating term need be made – for example, a relation of juxtaposition. A relation of this kind is an immediate relation (which, for its part, may be catalysed or necessitated in this or that way).

Within the conceptual field of mediation, as so far outlined, various possibilities exist. Two (or more) terms may be related (mediated) by means of a third, or further, term; or a single term may be related (mediated) to itself by a second term. Where a single term is mediated to itself, the relation between it and its mediation may or may not be reciprocal. Where it is reciprocal, there exist two terms each of which is the other's mediation, and each of which is mediated by the other to itself. This gives an idea of the internal richness of mediation's conceptual field: either there may exist two (or more) terms plus their mediation; or there may exist a single term plus its mediation; or there may exist two terms each mediating, and mediated by, each other. The first of these three possibilities is, perhaps, the one with which the notion of mediation is most commonly associated. (It is closest, for example, to dictionary definitions of 'to mediate'.) However, the third possibility is quite explicitly invoked by Hegel when he envisages a situation in which each of the two terms 'is for the other the middle [the mediating] term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself' (Hegel 1977 p. 112). The example he gives is that of a mutually recognitive relation between individual self-conscious subjects.

A further, and all-important, step is taken in exploring the concept of mediation when it is noticed that the process of mediation may be such as to bring about not merely a relation, but an internal relation: it is exclusively such instances of mediation which concern Hegel and Marx. (In the case of a single term which is mediated to itself, the corresponding possibility is that the process of mediation “totalises” discrete aspects into an internally related whole.) Prior to the mediation, that which is mediated may or may not have been internally related (or self-related). But, even supposing that it was, the mediation may establish a fresh internal-relatedness (or a fresh totalisation). If a (fresh) internal-relatedness or totalisation is established by the process of mediation, then the following is the consequence. Since (a) an internal relation is constitutive of the terms which it relates, and since (b) a mediation is itself – as already indicated – the relation of the term(s) concerned, we can say: in such cases, the mediation is the mode of existence of the related term(s). This can also be expressed – Marx and Hegel so express it – by saying that in such cases the mediation is the form or appearance of the term(s) which it internally relates.

Combining this notion of mediation as the mode of existence (form, appearance) of what is mediated with the third possible shape of mediation indicated earlier, a further possibility emerges: two terms may be the mode of existence of one another. And such is indeed the case, for Hegel, with two mutually recognitive self-consciousnesses: in Hegelian usage, the expression 'recognition' carries with it a specifically constitutive force. This being so, it follows that a recognitive relation between individuals in no way requires mediation through a discrete “third term” –
for example social institutions (or in Hegel's term 'spiritual masses') such as state and civil society (Hegel 1977 pp. 300-1) – separate from, and standing over against, the individuals concerned. The Hegel of the Phenomenology is in fact emphatic that the existence of 'spiritual masses' entails alienation, and that mutually recognitive (or non-alienated) social existence is possible only when no spiritual masses or social institutions exist: mutually recognitive self-consciousness 'no longer places its [social] world and its ground outside itself' (Hegel 1977 p. 265). Thus it is that being alive to the various possible shapes of mediation – in particular, the refusal to equate mediation as such with the first of the three possibilities above indicated – allows us to discern what is in effect an anarchist stratum in Hegel's thought. And the emergence of Left Hegelianism out of Hegel becomes intelligible at the same stroke: for example, Marx's 'On the Jewish Question' appears as a restatement of the critique of 'spiritual masses' which the Phenomenology contains. In the Philosophy of Right, by contrast, Hegel reinstates spiritual masses: individuals are seen as mediated to one another via the discrete “third term” of social institutions, most notably and most famously the institutions of civil society and the state. In virtue of this reinstatement, Hegel opens himself to the criticisms delivered by Marx in his Hegel-critique of 1843. The same point may be stated differently: the Hegel of the Phenomenology emerges as the Philosophy of Right's most trenchant critic.

The expressions “form” and “appearance”, introduced earlier, require further elaboration. I should like what I have said to be taken as (in the sense which is relevant here) defining them: the form or appearance of something is its mode of existence. This definitional sense is not, of course, the sense which “form” and “appearance” receive in ordinary language: there, form is understood as opposed to content and appearance is understood as opposed to reality or essence – as though something's form or appearance might be removed or altered without thereby effecting an essential change in the nature (the content or reality) of the “something” itself. In other words, the ordinary-language usage of “form” and of “appearance” is dualistic.

By contrast, their definitional sense (the sense which is relevant so far as mediation is concerned) is non-dualistic. What this involves is made clear by Hegel in his treatment of the relation between appearance and essence. According to Hegel 'essence must appear', i.e, the appearance is the essence's mode of existence: 'Essence...is not something beyond or behind appearance, but, just because it is the essence which exists, the existence is appearance' (Hegel 1892 papa. 131). The relation between appearance and essence here envisaged is non-dualistic inasmuch as it is in and through its appearance that the essence is. Essence stands out ahead of itself as appearance, and it is as thus standing ahead of itself that it exists: “appearance”, in other words, is to be understood not as a passive noun (an inert veil or cover) but as an “appearing”, i.e., in a sense which alludes to the activity of the verb. This thought is one which Hegel derives from Ancient philosophy. For Anaxagoras, similarly to Hegel and in contradistinction to Parmenides' dualistic counterposing of appearance to reality, 'Appearances are a glimpse of the obscure' (Kirk and Raven 1963 p. 394). Anaxagoras's saying is not to be understood as affirming that appearances comprise, so to say, a thin rather than a thick veil. Rather, his thought is that it is in the nature of what is not appearance – namely, being – to reveal/conceal itself or, in other words, to appear in the sense of standing (obscurely) forth. And, in fact, Marx's concepts of fetishism and of mystification register, so far as social being is concerned, an exactly parallel point.

I have dwelt on the non-dualistic meaning of the term “appearance” because this meaning is decisive for how Marx's Grundrisse and Capital are to be read. Famously, Marx speaks of penetrating through appearances to reality and urges that capitalist society appears to those who live in it in systematically misleading ways (e.g. Marx 1973 pp. 247, 674; 1976 p. 421; 1966 p. 817). Such passages are misunderstood if they are read – and of course they have been so read – as counterposing appearance to reality in a dualistic fashion, or as affirming that appearance is less real than the reality it fetishistically reveals/conceals. From the Grundrisse, it is clear enough that capitalism's appearance in terms of freedom, equality, property, etc. is a real moment in capitalist production relations taken as a whole. Marx drives this point home when he contends that social relations which appear as 'material relations between persons and social relations between things' appear 'as what they are' (Marx 1976 p. 166): this passage is unintelligible – it must seem as though Marx is endorsing a fetishised perspective – unless appearance is understood as the mediation (the mode of existence) of the relation in which the producers of commodities stand.1
If, despite all this, a dualistic understanding of the appearance/reality relation is forced upon Marx then the consequence is either determinism (reality is seen as causally conditioning an appearance which is distinct from it) or reductionism (not the appearance, but only the reality, is supposed finally to exist). Once appearances are understood as mediations no such consequences are entailed. Regarding fetishism and mystification, Marx's point is not that we can be mystified about reality, or even that we can be misled by reality, but that mystification – or “enchantment” – is the mode in which capitalist reality exists. So to say, capitalism exists as its own self-denial.

It may seem as though such a view inscribes mystification so deeply in capitalist social reality that the emergence, from capitalism, of revolutionary theory and practice becomes all but impossible. But precisely the opposite is the consequence if, as we shall see, capitalist appearances are modes of existence of relationships which are antagonistic through and through. It is the non-dualism of the appearance/reality relation which allows antagonisms to be matters of experience – to be 'glimpsed', in Anaxagoras's meaning – in however self-contradictory and distorted a way. Once appearance is dualistically severed from reality, by contrast, antagonism is placed outwith the domain of experience and the basis for a politics of revolutionary self-emancipation is undermined.

As with “appearance”, so with “form”. Marx's characteristic mode of questioning is always to ask “Why do these things take these forms?” (e.g. Marx 1976 pp. 173-4). The “things” concerned are production relations which are always, except in communist society, class relations, i.e., relations of struggle: in existing society it is the capital-labour which is “formed” – which gives form and is re-formed – in varying ways. Marx's project is 'to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized' (Marx 1976 p. 494). The “forms” concerned are the commodity-form, the value-form, the money-form, the wage-form, the state-form, etc. If “form” is understood dualistically, i.e. as opposed to content which is distinct from it, then once again (for reasons parallel to those given in connection with “appearance”) either determinism or reductionism results. In the event, however, forms are to be understood as mediations (as modes of existence, or appearances) of the class relation – under capitalism, the capital-labour relation – and hence of the struggle in which that relation consists. (On the centrality of class struggle to all the categories of Capital, see Cleaver 1977: every single category in Marx's critique of political economy is designed to contribute to the description of the mediations – the modes of existence – of class struggle, and this is one reason why Capital is to be seen as presenting a critique of political economy rather than a rival political economy on its own behalf.)

It is worth noticing that all of the mediations set forth by Marx stand to be mediated in their turn: for example, exchange-value is the mediation (the mode of existence or appearance) of value, and is for its part mediated by the money-form. For Marx, as for Hegel, no process of mediation is definitive: mediated terms may themselves call for remediation, and far from being static or merely “structural” the process of mediation and remediation is one in which the praxis of class struggle – and therefore capitalism's response to labour's insurgency – is inscribed. Better: mediation and remediation are at issue in class struggle, inasmuch as mediations are forms of class struggle. As usual, it is the categories which thematize activity – here, the activity of struggle – which are given primacy by Marx. Understood thus, the concept of mediation explodes all deterministic readings and establishes revolutionary subjectivity at the very centre of Marx's work.

This being so, there can be no question of revolutionaries having to intervene from outside (like Leninist vanguardists) in inert social structures in order to conjure struggle into existence or to generate praxis from process, since it is as mediations of struggle and as at issue in struggle that social “structures” and social “processes” exist. In this sense, for Marx as for Hegel (and in opposition to every variety of bourgeois or pseudo-Marxist sociology), a social world 'is not a dead essence, but is actual and alive' (Hegel 1977 p. 264). It follows that the politics entailed by a reading of Marx in the light of the category of mediation is, with Luxemburg, a politics of spontaneism: but in the Marxist tradition Luxemburg's category of spontaneism has been understood no less confusedly than the category of mediation itself. At the close of the present paper, I shall offer brief comment on what I take the category of spontaneism to involve.

An additional virtue of the concept of mediation is that it makes possible a theorising of the relation between class struggle and struggles of other kinds. For example, the relation of class oppression to sexual oppression has been a topic of notorious difficulty in both feminist and Marxist thought: sexual and class oppression are intertwined, but of course sexual oppression is older than the capital-labour relation. The necessary insight here is to the effect that capitalist valorisation is not a closed dynamic. i.e., not merely one which destroys, externally, all 'patriarchal and idyllic' pre-capitalist forms (although just such a view seems to be implied in, for example, the Communist Manifesto's opening pages). Rather, it is to be seen as an open process of totalisation which is always ready to incorporate – viciously, voraciously – whatever in pre-capitalism can serve its purposes and lies ready to hand. It incorporates such elements as its own mediations, and in so doing re-“forms” them (understanding “form”, here, in the definitional sense specified above). In this way, capitalism re-forms the family and transforms sexual relations within the family into a “form” of the capital-labour relation itself: the nuclear family comes into being cotemporally with industrial capitalism (Shorter 1976). The sexual relation becomes a mediation of the class relation and vice versa. Women's unpaid labour in the nuclear family serves as a free subsidy to capital so far as the reproduction of labour-power is concerned.2
Thus, sexual emancipation presupposes, but is not reducible to, class emancipation (and vice versa). This analysis is the opposite of reductionist because it construes the process whereby capital re-forms sexual relations as one of struggle and implies neither that all of existing sexual oppression is a consequence of this re-formation – although it is all affected by it – nor that sexual oppression will be automatically terminated once the capital-labour relation is destroyed.

In passing, it can be noted that capitalism's continuing employment of pre-capitalist relations is crucial not merely for any concrete understanding of the capital- labour relation's mediations but also for an understanding of the sources of legitimacy upon which capital may draw. (An example is racist legitimacy, bound up with a heritage of anti-semitism and slavery, so far as the capitalist state is concerned. Amongst other things, this heritage makes it possible for capital to organise a flow of “immigrant” labour-power to and fro across the state's boundaries and in accordance with valorisation's needs.) To see capitalist valorisation as a closed and sheerly self-sustaining dynamic, and capitalist legitimacy as stemming solely from the exchange relation, is to downplay its capacity for incorporating, as its own mediations, that which is or was non-capitalist – and so to underestimate the strength (deriving from flexibility) of that to which revolutionary struggle is opposed. The sheer 'formalism' of the exchange relation would supply capitalism only with a weak legitimation; the 'substantial' sources from which it can derive strong – but nonetheless always problematic – legitimation are both older and more “irrational” and mythic than a Marxism impressed with the hegemony of liberal values would suppose (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). Sometimes, fascism is analysed as an archaic throwback to times before capitalist rationality prevailed; if this is accepted, however, the conclusion must be that all capitalist states are fascist on precisely this score. The advantage of the category of mediation, here, is that it allows us to break away from the image of a “pure” capitalism overlain and sullied by what Stalinist Marxism terms 'survivals' from a pre-capitalist past. On the contrary to such views: the strength of capital is its capacity to re-form pre-capitalist relations as its own mediations and thereby to translate them into modes of existence of itself.

What I have said about “form” sheds light on yet another contentious area of Marxist theorising, this time an area of a methodological kind. One of the central topics addressed in Marx's 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse manuscripts is that of the relation between categories which are (in their designation) abstract and categories which are concrete, and we learn that, instead of starting from the concrete and abstracting from it, we must start from the abstract and show how the concrete is composed out of it – the concrete, here, being viewed as 'the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse' (Marx 1973 p. 101). I shall not attempt to explain all the issues raised in this complex passage, but only to draw out a distinction between two ways in which the abstract/concrete relation can be understood.

Abstracting from the concrete involves abstraction in what may be termed an empiricist sense: the more I abstract, the further I move away from (concrete) reality and the less real – the more purely conceptual – my abstractions become. Marx is for his part willing to employ abstraction in this sense, as when he remarks that 'all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction...' (Marx 1973 p. 86). But he adds at once that 'there is no production in general' (Marx 1973 p. 86), in the sense that production is always historically specific, and one of his objections to vulgar political economy is that it confuses abstraction in its empiricist meaning with abstraction in a sense which the notion of mediation brings to light. In this latter sense, that which is abstract can be a mode of existence (a form) of that which is historically specific and no less real than any other aspect of the concrete totality in which it inheres. Mediations, in short, may be either abstract or concrete or a (contradictory) unity of the two. The example which Marx gives of abstraction as mediation is labour, which 'achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society' (Marx 1973 p. 105) wherein value-production obtains. The 'dual character' of labour (Marx 1976 pp. 131ff.) as abstract and concrete – as productive of value and of use-value – is one among the mediations of the capital-labour relation itself. Confusing abstraction in the empiricist sense with abstraction in the sense of mediation allows the political economists to construe that which is specific to capitalism (in the present example: abstract labour) as intrinsic to production under all social formations whatever. This confusion is one aspect of the fetishism of categories to which Marx is constantly opposed.

Once again, we arrive at a point which is decisive for how Marx's own critique of political economy is to be read. To be sure, the first volume of Capital discusses “capital in general” in abstraction (more or less) from the questions posed by the existence of “many capitals”, and even at the end of Volume Three we still have to 'leave aside' the conjunctures of the world market, credit and so forth (Marx 1966 p. 831). But this in no way entails that the value-form, abstract labour, surplus-value, etc. – in short, all the central topics of Volume One – are less real than the topics approached as the arguments of Volume Three unfold. Value and labour precisely as abstractions, in the sense of mediations or modes of existence of the capital-labour relation, do real (and murderous) political and exploitative work. The mediations which Volumes Two and Three of Capital add to those of Volume One – the remediations, in other words, of these former mediations – in no way subtract from the importance of the story (the story of the capital-labour relation as a relation of class struggle) which Volume One tells. Nor is it a matter of a “pure model” of capitalism – which exists no more than does 'production in general' or a Weberian 'ideal type' – being moved “closer to reality” by successive stages. To be sure, Volume Three approaches 'step by step the form which they [the 'various forms of capital'] assume on the surface of society...and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves' (Marx 1966 p. 25): but just here it is important to keep the sense of “forms” and of “appearances” as mediations clearly in mind. For example, “many capitals” is the mode of existence of “capital in general” and, minus the 'practical truth' – the real social existence – of “capital in general”, the intelligibility of “many capitals” disappears. The point here is more than a textual one. If Volume One is treated as presenting a “pure model” of capitalism (an abstraction in the empiricist sense), then Marxism's emphasis on class struggle – the struggle inscribed in the capital-labour relation – evaporates; both in theory and in practice, one finishes up endorsing the mystified 'ordinary consciousness' of capitalist social relations and the fetishism in which (as Volume Three demonstrates) that consciousness is steeped. To read Marx as an empiricist – as employing only an empiricist concept of abstraction – is to read him as a reformist, and both his political and his theoretical challenges are evaded at a single stroke.

One way of summing up what has been said concerning Marx is to see it as articulating further the possible shapes of mediation discussed above. For it will be apparent that, for Marxism, one application of the concept of mediation as mode of existence (as form or appearance) is of key importance, namely, the application of this species of mediation to a situation wherein, prior to mediation, an antagonistic – or self-antagonistic – relation characterises the to-be-mediated terms. Indeed the antagonism may be one strong enough to destroy the terms, as in the Communist Manifesto's scenario of 'the common ruin of the contending classes'. Hegel tells us what a mediation of antagonistic terms can mean: it can mean that each antagonistically (or self-antagonistically) related term achieves the 'power to maintain itself in contradiction' (Hegel 1971 para. 382), or in other words in its antagonism (which is not at all to say that the antagonism is removed outright or abolished). Suppose, now, that a mediation of this kind brings about an internal relation between, or within, the antagonistic term(s): in such a case, the mediation is the mode of existence not merely of the term(s) themselves but of their antagonism. The antagonism concerned is not removed, but on the contrary is sustained and set on a new footing, inasmuch as (qua mediated) it no longer consumes and destroys or undermines itself. Thus, for Marx, mediations of the contradictions inherent in the commodity-form (the central contradiction is between use-value and exchange-value, and its mediation is money) 'does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form [read: the mode of existence] within which they have room to move' (Marx 1976 p, 198).

In this example, mediation allows not only the antagonistic terms but their antagonism to remain in being. Money, as the mediation of the commodity, is not just superadded to the commodity but is the mode of existence of the commodity itself: 'The riddle of the money fetish is...the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes' (Marx 1976 p. 187). In the absence of this mediation, use-value and value would remain merely juxtaposed, in the sense that use-value production, as a condition of all social existence, is by no means merely value- production and indeed points beyond it. Not the least aspect of the fetishism of commodities is the circumstance that use-value production, as a universally imposed condition of human existence, is established, through mediation, as related internally to value. Hereby, fetishistically, the existence of capitalism becomes inscribed in the ineluctibly given order of things.

Antagonism, of course, returns us once again to class struggle: if the various moments of capital are mediations (forms, modes of existence) of class struggle, then they are mediations which sustain this struggle not merely within the (broad) limits of the avoidance of 'common ruin' but within the (narrow) limits of a capital-imposed order of things. If this is so, then it seems that neither set of limits can become an issue for class struggle – social existence can involve risks neither per se nor for the powers that be – as long as these mediations are in play. And yet, since it is as an antagonistic relation – the capital-labour relation – which they mediate, it is as forms of struggle that capital's mediations always-already exist. The “play” of mediation is thus the play (the risk-taking praxis) of struggle itself. Risk, that is, is intrinsic to social existence and remains so even when it exists in the mode of being denied.

And this returns us to the topic of spontaneism, touched on above. The presence of antagonism in capital (and as capital) allows us to say that, in capitalist society, mediation always and only exists as the possibility of, so to say, going into reverse gear. Mediation exists as the possibility of demediation. Putting matters in this way allows us to avoid what would be a new form of reductionism, namely, a discovery (an uncovering) of class struggle as a level of pristine and authentic immediacy which lies under mediation's shell. Reductionism would be involved here inasmuch as immediacy would be counterposed to mediation, in a dualistic fashion, as the latter's essence and truth. In fact, what lies under mediation's shell is nothing: or, rather, the whole metaphor of a “shell” (together with its famous “kernel”) is inapplicable since the mode of existence of class struggle is the process of mediation and the possibility of demediation itself. This means that the antagonistic contradiction of mediation/demediation is intrinsic to class struggle, as Luxemburg lucidly sees: 'On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On the one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical movement through which the socialist revolution makes its way' (Luxemburg 1970 pp. 128-9). This 'dialectical', or in other words contradictory and self-contradictory, movement is the movement which the term “spontaneism” connotes. In no way does spontaneism conjure, magically and romantically, a surging groundswell of immediacy which will eventually carry before it the web of mediations whose putative truth it is and to which it is externally juxtaposed. On the contrary, the contradiction inscribed in mediation is inscribed in the challenge to mediation as well, and there is no space of immediacy located outside of mediation which might supply a foothold or point of departure from which revolutionary challenge could spring. Spontaniesm connotes demediation and not the conjuring of immediacy, as Luxemburg (unlike her critics) already so sharply sees.

These two things are true: mediation exists as the possibility of demediation; and there is no immediacy, not even in revolution's camp.

If this is so, then the project of revolution (the project of demediation) always contains something paradoxical and, as it were, ironic and playful (it is demediation “making its play”). What Adorno says of the dialectic of identity and non-identity applies to the dialectic of mediation and demediation as well: 'I have no way but to break imminently, and in its own measure, through the appearance [read once again: the mode of existence] of total identity' if non-identity is to come to light (Adorno 1973 p. 5), since it is as modes of existence of one another that identity and non-identity obtain. Indeed, more than analogy relates Adorno's defence of non-identity to the theme of mediation/demediation, since a good part of revolutionary struggle turns on the articulation of that which is particular and nonidentical and hence marginalized with respect to the conformism that any social order entails. This is most evidently the case with sexual politics but holds equally for class politics as well. In Georges Bataille's terms: heterogeneity is to be rescued from the homogeneity which, for example, the bourgeois exchange relation presupposes and enshrines (cf. Bataille 1985 and, on identity and the exchange relation, Adorno 1973). But rescuing particularity and heterogeneity and nonidentity must involve paradox since universality, homogeneity and identity are inscribed in the very conceptual ordering whereby any rescue-attempt must be thought through (to say nothing of the organisational forms which revolutionary practice may find itself driven to adopt). 'The concept of the particular is always its negation at the same time; it cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named, and replaces it with identity' (Adorno 1973 p. 173). As with the concept of particularity, so with the concept of demediation: in order to remain in play, it is called upon always to think against itself. And if there remains something opaque about the category of demediation, so be it. Transparency would announce it merely as a fresh mediation, and so close the conceptual space within which the figure of 'revolutionary subjectivity' finds itself able to appear.

Acknowledgements

Kosmas Psychopedis convinced me of the importance of mediation and my poor understanding of it. In the course of many discussions, Werner Bonefeld helped me to see issues at stake.

References

Adorno, T. W. 1973: Negative Dialectics (Routledge and Kegan Paul)

Bataille, G. 1985: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Manchester University Press)

Cleaver, H. 1977: Reading 'Capital' Politically (Harvester Press)

Dalla Costa, M., and James, S. 1976: The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press)

Hegel, G. W. F. 1892: Logic [Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Vol. I] (Clarendon Press)

Hegel G. W. F. 1971: Philosophy of Spirit [Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Vol. III] (Oxford University Press)

Hegel G. W. F. 1977: Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press)

Horkheimer, M., and Adorno, T. W. 1969: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Allen Lane)

Kirk, G. S., and Raven, J. E. 1963: The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge University Press)

Luxemburg, R. 1970: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (Pathfinder Press)

Marx, K. 1966: Capital Vol. III (Progress Publishers)

Marx, K. 1973: Grundrisse (Penguin Books)

Marx, K. 1976: Capital Vol. I (Penguin Books)

Negri, A. 1984: Marx beyond Marx (Bergin and Garvey)

Shorter, E. 1976: The Making of the Modern Family (Collins)

Taken from richard-gunn.com/marx-and-marxism

• 1Here, I speak of the mediation of a relation whereas, previously, I have spoken of the mediation of terms. What may seem like a confusion is only a verbal difficulty, which may be resolved in one of two ways. Either the expression 'term' may be understood in a broad fashion, so as to include relations as one species of term. (In this case, the relation between commodity producers is mediated to itself through the commodity form.) Or the commodity producers themselves may be understood as the 'terms' which the commodity form mediates or relates. Nothing turns on which of these alternative resolutions is adopted, and the expression 'mediation of a relation' can be understood as shorthand for this either/or.
• 2See Dalla Costa and Jones 1976. In her notes to the 1976 edition of this work, Dalla Costa mistakenly says that women's housework is productive not merely of use-value (the use-value of labour-power) but of value and surplus value as well. If this were so, it would destroy her own argument: women's housework would increase (instead of holding down) the value of labour-power, and capital would have an interest in decreasing the amount of housework which women do.

Mediation is one of Marx's concepts which is very much neglected within the 'marxist' discourse. Nevertheless, I think it is one of the most important concepts within marxism. The concept 'mediation' challenges academic marxism and it provides a conceptual framework for the politics of marxism (see Bonefeld 1987).

Before I go into further detail on 'mediation', I want to concentrate briefly on the 'nature' of marxist concepts.

The marxist categories are abstractions of the concrete and complex reality of capitalism. These abstractions decode the "innermost secret, the hidden basis of the relations of sovereignty and dependence" (Marx 1966, p. 791-2). 'The concrete is concrete because it unites diverse phenomena. The concrete is the unity of variety' (see Marx 1973, p.101). Marx's concept of abstract and concrete is thus the methodological metaphor for the continuity of the discontinuous development of the concrete within the abstract and vice versa (see Bonefeld 1987), The analytical abstraction from the concrete leads ''towards the reproduction of the concrete by way of thought" (Marx 1973, p.101). This "is the only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in mind" (Marx 1973, p. 101). Thus, the idea of the world “is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” (Marx 1983, p.29). Only after the development of the substantial abstraction of the innermost secret of the reality can the real movement of the material world be presented appropriately. These abstractions conceptualise the determining relation of capitalism in order to understand its 'perverted and enchanted world' (Marx 1966 p.830). The abstract categories are abstractions from the concrete in order to comprehend the concrete. The only existence of the abstract is within the concrete.

The marxist concepts contain the unifying dynamic of the process of antagonism, which in no case eliminates the antagonism of capitalism (see Negri 1984). This antagonism is the antatonism of labour and capital. The marxist categories contain the reciprocal recognition of labour and capital as an intrinsic relation of struggle. This applies for all the marxist categories. The rnarxist concepts have to be open to the changes in the composition of the social relations which occur during the process of transformation. This is ever more obvious, since it is marxism that analyses the permanent decomposition and recomposition of bourgeois society as a structurally given mediation of its social antagonism and thus as a means of its existence (see Bonefeld 1987). In this sense, the analysis of the hidden laws of capitalism leads inherently to the analysis of the mediation of class antagonism: the modus vivendi of the crisis-ridden development of the capital-labour relation.

The marxist concepts thus contain the analytical perception of the 'hidden laws' and the inherent possibilities of change, both within capitalism (re- and decomposition of form of social relations)' and against capitalist mode of production. Thus, they contain the possibility of 'barbarism and socialism' (see Luxemburg). Marxist conceptions thus contain the notion of the 'possibility' and 'unpredictability' of the development of the capital relation. Marxist categories conceptualise the variety of phenomena as implicit forms of the presence of labour within capital, and thus struggle. The concepts entail the capital labour relation as a relation of subject and object of historical development (see Lukács 19711 ). The categories therefor contain their own negation: they are forms of thought which seek to comprehend the development of the antagonistic social relation and thus to understand history as object and result of struggle.

MEDIATION

The concept of mediation has to be seen within the above outline. The 'determinate abstraction' (see Negri 1984) promotes an analysis of what is mediated. Whereby the mediation itself is inherently contradictory due to its generation as a structurally necessary mode of existence of the organisational presence of labour within capital.

The term mediation inherently contains its own negation which I shall refer to as de-mediation. This term seeks to comprehend the constitution of class through struggle. The term de-mediation will be discussed later.

Concentrating on the term mediation, it contains the analytical penetration of the reality of capitalism as a complex diversity of phenomena. The term mediation is open to the structurally given crisis-ridden transformation of the mode of existence, although the basic pattern remains: the capital relation of necessary and surplus labour.

The recognition of class struggle as the motor of history is basic for the understanding of 'mediation', all-the more because the social antagonism of the capital-labour relation is the relation which is mediated. Economic, social and political phenomena have thus to be seen as object and result of struggle. The historical materialisation of former struggle confines and conditions class struggle (see Marx 1943).

According to Marx, antagonistic relations express themselves always in forms (value-form, state form) (see Marx 1983, p. 106). 'Form' is the 'modus vivendi' (Marx 1983, p. 106) of antagonistic relations. The mediation of antagonistic relations in certain 'forms' does not 'sweep away' (Marx) the inconsistencies of antagonistic relations. Form, and thus mediation, “is generally the way in which real contradictions are reconciled” (Marx 1983, p. 106). Thus, the term mediation refers to the form of existence which allows the antagonistic relations to “exist side by side” (Marx 1983, p. 106).

Thus, it is within 'form' that antagonistic relations can articulate themselves. For this reason I would follow Marx in speaking of the 'perverted and enchanted world' (Marx 1966, p. 830) as a form of existence. Form mediates the existence of antagonisms as a condition of their own existence. As such, the existence of antagonism is a mediated existence, or, with reference to Marx, a fetishized reality. This reality is the material world of capitalism which is based upon class antagonism, which is reproduced by class struggle, which is shattered by crisis (itself also a form of capitalism) and which is dynamically and constantly transformed due to the presence of labour within capital. The mode of mediation is the sole existence of class antagonism.

The totality of phenomena is the material world of antagonism, that is its mode of existence. The relations of production as well as political power relations have thus to be seen as forms of existence of antagonistic relations. The historically changing mode of existence (or appearance, form) has to be grasped as the maerial world of the capital relation which bathes all social, normative and political phenomena in a certain colour (see Marx 1973, p. 107).

Thus, the fetishized world of capitalism is no closed system precisely because it is the form of the capital-labour relation and because it has to be reproduced by class struggle. It is only through struggle that the form of mediation is reproduced and the fethishization of society perpetuated. Contrary to deterministic approaches, this fetishized reality is the reality of captialism as a necessary form of mediation of antagonism. Thus, the enchanted world of capitalism cannot be dismissed as a cover of the veiled reality of truthful laws of capitalism. The only existence of abstract general laws is the cover itself. As such, capitalism exists as a 'totality' of social phenomena within which the antagonism is mediated, with which the antagonism is reproduced and without which capitalism wouldn't exist. The 'determinate abstraction' (Negri 1984) of the enchanted and perverted world of capitalism does not create a hidden reality of capitalism, which is separated from its cover, and from which the false reality of freedom and equality can be deduced as a 'appearance' which is (necessarily) 'wrong' as opposed to 'true' (the hidden laws). The determinate abstraction, conversely to structuralist approaches, depicts the so-called 'cover' as the material existence of class-antagonism.

The concepts of 'Das Kapital' and of the 'Grundrisse' compose the enchanted world in the process of thinking. These concepts thus categorise the mode of existence within which the class antagonism is inscribed and operating, and which is the material world of capitalism. The concept of surplus value, for example, does not exist as an abstract concept of Capital Volume I with which an understanding of the 'concealed' reality should be achieved. It is rather the existence of surplus value production which composes the reality of capitalist exploitation within and through the material world of capitalism, this latter being the mediated mode of existence of antagonism.

The continuity of capitalism resolves itself in the crisis-ridden development of the capital-labour relation. This dynamic development is mediated through the discontinuity of captial's mode of existence, that is, its form of control and its form of pervertion. This permanence of change is mediated by crisis. The transformation of the mode of existence of surplus value production is the historical mediation of the capital-labour class antagonism. The crisis-ridden de- and re-composition of the mode of existence is thus the historical mediation of the achieved form of the material world of capitalism. History is a process of class struggle whose dialectical contradiction is inscribed in the relation of subject and object. Thus, history has to be conceptualised as a totality within which 'kernal and skin constitute the unity' (Labriola 1974, p. 151).

Summing up the argument, the 'enchanted and perverted world' is the only existence of capitalism. The mode of existence is neither cover nor surface. The mode of existence is the mediation of class antagonism. It is the capital-labour relation which illuminates the colour of the social phenomena whose totality constitutes the "concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse" (Marx 1973, p. 101).

DE-MEDIATION

Due to the organisational existence of labour within capital, the mediation of the capital-labour relation is permanently driven into crisis-contradiction-de-mediation and further transcendence.

The mediation of antagonism is thus in a constant process of reproduction-contradiction-crisis and transformation. Fetishized reality does not exist as a closed system. The mediation of class antagonism does not sweep away antagonism and inconsistencies, precisely because it is the mode of existence of antagonisms. The existence of antagonsim in a concealed form (see Marx 1966, p. 817) has to be reproduced by the intercourse of capital and labour: that is struggle.

The fetishized reality has constantly to be reproduced by struggle. As such, it comes constantly into conflict with experience. Thus, it is not only the academical mind which understands the determinating cause of the mode of existence. However, the existence of the abstract in the concrete unifies class conflict and promotes the perception of class antagonism and the understanding of the 'interrelated relation' 'to the popular mind' (see Marx 1966, p. 817). As such, the fetishized reality of capitalism is far from being a closed system whose existence can only be grasped by an intellectually inspired vanguard party acting from 'outside' and administering the 'misled' masses.

The presence of labour within capital constantly de-mediates the mediation of capitalism. Struggle constitutes the de-fetishization of the enchanted and perverted world of capitalism. 'The dialectical relation between subject and object in the development of history' (see Lukács 1971, p. 61) is explicitly elaborated within the marxist method of determinate abstraction and tendency (see Negri 1984, p. 13). It is this dialectical relation between subject and object which provides the understanding of de-mediation as a form of demystification, denuciation and critique of capitalism. All of these forms of de-mediation are intrinsically bound to the practice of destabilisation, decomposition and destruction. Thus, the unity of theory and practice which is explicit for the politics of marxism dwells on the antagonistic class relation of capitalism.

De-mediation thus refers to the constitution of class through struggle. Struggle inherently contains both the reproduction of mediation and the destruction of mediation. Struggle possibly demystifies equality as a mediation of capitalist exploitation, it possibly denounces freedom as a mediation of domination and it possibly criticises 'rights' as a moment of exploitation and destruction (see Gunn 1987).

The activity of labour against its existence as proletarian labour entails the de-mediation of its own experience as wage-labour or, in other words, the recognition of itself as variable capital. Thus, the unifying dynamic of the process of surplus value production continually drives its mediation into contradiction and into de-mediation.

DE-MEDIATION AND MEDIATION

"On the one hand, we have the mass, on the other, its historic goal, located outside the existing society. On the one hand, we have day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way" (Luxemburg 1970, p. 128-129).

Mediation and de-mediation are consistent and permanent features of the course of class struggle. The constitution of class through struggle promotes tendencies of de-mediation which are explicitly part of the 'dialectical contradiction' articulated by Luxemburg: day-to-day struggle and socialist revolution. In this context the interwoven process of mediation and de-mediation refers to the possibility of emancipation and the possibility of defeat, that is, the possibilities of socialism and of the transformation of struggle into a new mode of mediation. Luxemburg seems to take this on board when she speaks about the inherent possibilities of socialism and barbarism (see Luxemburg 1970 p. 268, 327). The de-mediation of capitalism is a force inscribed in the dialectic relation of class antagonism. De-mediation thus includes its negation: mediation. The dialectic relation of struggle thus inherently involves the effort to reverse de-mediation by transforming the mode of existence of antagonism. Marx discusses this reciprocal action inherent in the dialectical relation of class antagonism on various occasions. This reciprocal action of antagonism is conditioned by the results of former struggle. Within marxist discourse the relation of mediation and de-mediation is discussed as the reciprocal action of subject and object within the development of history (see Lukács) or as determinate abstraction and tendency (see Negri 1984). The two following examples should clarify this argument: The constitution of class through struggle is seen as productive for the development of the state in the same way as strikes are for the implementation of new machinery (see Marx 1969). Against the 'revolts of the working-class' within production the implementation of new machinery is used as a 'weapon' (Marx 1983, p. 411) to establish control over labour. Struggle thus reproduces capitalism and transforms its mode of existence. Thus, the constitution of class and the transformation of the mode of existence of the capital-labour relation are closely interwoven.

Mediation and de-mediation are concepts which seek to understand the course of struggle. They are dialectically interwoven concepts within which the development of class struggle is inscribed. Thus, they conceptualise the dialectical process of subject and object during history: de-mystification and de-composition, destabilisation and new order of control, practice and counterpractice. In this way, mediation and de-mediation refer to the reproduction of the enchanted world through struggle, which inherently involves the transformation of the capitalist mode of existence and the permanence of primitive accumulation (see Bonefeld 1987).

The permanent and dynamic effort of capital to restructure its control over labour is the precondition of the stability of the capitalist system and vice versa. As for labour, it is the action of destabilisation which immediately leads to the action of destruction (see Negri 1979). The historical form within which the transformation is promoted is crisis, so that the process of mediation is consistently the object and the result of struggle.

The capitalist modes of existence are constantly de-mediated and mediated by the hidden law of their determination: class antagonism and class struggle. Hence, the alternative of socialism and barbarism.

References:
Bonefeld 1987 Open Marxism, in Common Sense no. 1

Gunn 1987 Rights, in Edinburgh Review No. 77

Labriola 1974 Über den historischen Materialismus, Frankfurt

Lukács 1971 Geschichte und KlassenbewuBtsein, Luchterhand

Luxemburg 1970 Speaks, New York

Marx 1943 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, London

Marx 1966 Capital Vol III, London

Marx 1969 Theories of Surplus Value Vol I

Marx 1973 Grundrisse, Manuscripts of the Critique of Political Economy

Marx 1983 Capital Vol I, London

Negri 1979 Sabotage, Munchen

Negri 1984 Marx Beyond Marx, Notes on the Grundrisse

• 1I do not, however, share Lukács's messianic belief: in the proletariat as the historical executor of history's essence.